July 2010
Spencer Gordon on Michael Dennis' Coming Ashore On Fire
Now these are poems I could get into, says my partner, who’s been reading Michael Dennis’s latest collection while I’ve been making dinner. They’re direct, easy to understand, emotional, she continues. They make me feel something, but it’s something good—they don’t make me feel stupid, which is a huge relief. + More
My Literary Leviathan
by Amy Lavender HarrisDuring the five years it has taken to research and write the Imagining Toronto book (forthcoming, finally, in the fall of 2010), I have made an effort to read almost every Toronto-related literary work ever published. In the process I have read poetry published in broadsheets dating to Mackenzie’s abortive 1837 rebellion, long-forgotten 19th-century novels set in Rosedale, a futuristic work of science-fiction imagining Toronto in 1928 and a Harlequin romance featuring a lurid sex scene on the floor of the mayor’s office. I’ve read the Toronto canon—Atwood, Ondaatje, Michaels, Garner and Callaghan—as well as dozens of authors— among them Gwendolyn MacEwen, Catherine Bush, Rabindranath Maharaj and Dionne Brand—whose work should also be required reading for anyone interested in the city’s literature. I have read and written about nearly all of Toronto’s 170 or so neighbourhoods and most of its civic and natural spaces, as well as its diverse array of socioeconomic, cultural and sexual communities. While not managing to read quite everything ever set in Toronto, I have, after having read well over a thousand literary works, seen far more than a representative sample of the city’s prodigious literary output. + Expand
Only one book has defeated me.
Josef Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls, first published in Czech in 1977 and translated into English in 1984, is my literary Leviathan. Despite its many deserved accolades—it won the Governor General’s Award in 1984 and the Toronto Book Award in 1985, and Skvorecky himself has received many high honours, among them a Nobel Prize nomination and a Guggenheim Fellowship—the book has stymied me at every turn of the page. I have simply been unable to get through it.
Skvorecky’s novel is considered a contemporary classic of international scope, a scathing indictment of state repression and a brilliant satire of Canadian political naiveté. Milan Kundera described it as “magnificent” and called it “a magnum opus in all respects.”
And I? Wearily, doggedly, I’ve gotten as far as page 83.
Like most people, I have a few literary prejudices. Epic novels, particularly those dealing with political matters on a grand scale, bore me. Novels, even great ones, written by older men extolling their youthful heroism and sexual prowess, strike me as tedious. Moreover, because my days are spent dealing with edits and engaging with my little daughter, I have time to read now only at night. And every night I open Skvorecky’s novel and plod through another page or two before drifting off—but only for a moment before the book (a 600-page opus weighing in at five or six pounds) smacks me sharply on the nose. This cycle repeats two or three times, until I heave the book over the side of the bed and give up until the next night.
But I keep reading, in large part because Skvorecky examines one aspect of Canadian culture that remains mainly unacknowledged. In the opening pages of the novel he describes Canada as “this country of cities with no past” and adds, “I feel wonderful. I feel utterly and dangerously wonderful in this wilderness land.” Skvorecky’s protagonist is a survivor of the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia, and in his view one of the most compelling, if exasperating, virtues of Toronto is its amnesia, its failure to remember or take seriously the wounds of history. A professor at the “Edenvale” campus of the University of Toronto, Skvorecky’s protagonist attempts, with limited success, to cut through his students’ superficiality by pointing out analyses of totalitarianism and truth in prominent, primarily American, works of literature.
Skvorecky’s depictions of Toronto have a farcical quality. Czech émigrés like himself are dogged by secret agents hoping to gather incriminating evidence to take back to the Soviets, while Toronto whirls around them, a glittering, snowy wonderland of restaurants, booze, gossip and sexual dalliance. Haunted by history, Skvorecky’s protagonist is unable to let go of his past and, like many Torontonians, drifts through two cities simultaneously: present-day Toronto, where he lives in comfort and security, and the remembered, repressive Prague of his vanished youth.
In his famous poem “Civil Elegies,” Dennis Lee laments Torontonians’ ignorance of their past, writing that “in the city I long for men complete their origins” before deploring “that not / one countryman has learned, that / men and women live that / they may make that / life worth dying.” George Jonas echoes and answers Lee’s poem in “City Elegy,” writing, “yes: it is not / skyscrapers subways green belts / theatres neighbourhoods children / but war that forges a city and no city / lives that has not lived through war.”
This is one reason I continue to plug away at Skvorecky. I was born in Toronto, in a Canada my ancestors lived in long before it was a country. I have not lived through war, but I try to live by understanding the origins and consequences of conflict. My husband, an academic who was born in Soviet Romania and grew up in the Middle East before coming to this country in his teens, writes that “being Canadian means having nothing to declare.” He means this both critically and admiringly, finding not only emptiness but also beauty in this untouched city, this safe harbour for so many people who have landed here fleeing war.
For most people Toronto is a safe city, a city where, as Skvorecky writes, “one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one’s dreams until some improbable future.” Toronto is a city of the present, a city that celebrates possibility. It is a city largely without memory, and if this means we can live together as neighbours without, for the most part, coming to blows, it means also we risk forgetting that peace and freedom are things we must guard and be willing to stand up for. We need writers like Skvorecky, and Jones and Lee, to jar us out of our complacency when we are tempted to drift off.
Amy Lavender Harris is the author of Imagining Toronto, forthcoming this fall from Mansfield Press.
Drunk Poets Not as Cool as Drunk Rock Stars
by Priscila UppalAlongside Eugene Ionesco and George F. Walker plays, Erín Moure’s O Resplandor and Nikolai Gogol short stories, my guilty-pleasure beach reading while recently in Barbados was the autobiography Slash (co-written with Anthony Bozza). I say “guilty” pleasure, but it’s nearly impossible to feel any guilt whatsoever about your life when compared to the depravity and hedonistic debauchery of music gods: five-star hotel wreckage, orgies with porn stars and strippers, environmentally disastrous alcohol and drug toxicity levels, even the stealing of rare poisonous snakes from pet stores (Slash not only had a gallon-a-day vodka habit, as well as heroin, crack and painkiller addictions, but rampant kleptomania, which included procuring his first signature top hat). + Expand
Mostly, when one discusses or reads about the alcohol and drug addictions of various 20th-century poets—Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Dorothy Parker, Charles Bukowski, even Canada’s own Gwendolyn MacEwen or Al Purdy—the overall tone is sombre, the gaze regretful, the verdict pathetic. Poets drink shit wine and beer and are scurried away at closing time, while rock stars drink themselves into stupors on yachts and crash Corvettes while high on coke. Poets wreck their marriages to loyal academics or gardeners, while rock stars have threesomes with their band members and record their sexual escapades for sound effects (i.e., those are real cries of sexual pleasure on the track “Rocket Queen”—Axl Rose with GN’R drummer Steven Adler’s ex-girlfriend). Poets owe everyone money and go into therapy, and rock stars go into luxurious rehabs and get state-of-the-art heart defibrillators. When they get sober, they also get personal trainers and six-pack abs. Poets get fat and start to pay their taxes.
Reading Slash robbed me of any lingering teenage wish to have been able to hang out with the virtuoso guitarist or any member of GN’R, Mötley Crüe or Aerosmith in their heyday (and no woman would ever want to cross paths with David Lee Roth, who was apparently the most promiscuous of the lot), but it does leave one in awe of the abuses the body, mind and soul can stand in the name of rock ’n’roll. And I for one sincerely hope that Bozza is working with Courtney Love next.
Priscila Uppal is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Winter Sport: Poems (Mansfield Press).
A Lucky Child in Unlucky Times: Fiction Opens a Family’s Tragic War File
by Angelike Contis (Reprinted with permission from The National Herald (Ethnikos Kirix) June 19 -25, 2010.)Southampton, N.Y. – Though it ended in 1949, for many Greek families, the country’s brutal Civil War is not over. This Marianne Apostolides discovered over the 12 years she worked on her new book The Lucky Child, a fictional account of her family’s tragic war experiences in Northern Greece that leads up to her grandfather Agamemnon’s murder at the hands of his fellow Greeks in 1943. The author explained that a silence still shrouds the Civil War, as people fear that even by talking about it “the barbaric way Greeks treated each other will be unleashed.” But The Lucky Child sets an example of the benefits of revisiting the past, however painful, as it zooms in on the Apostolides family’s experience in Thessaloniki and the village of Zagora between 1932 and the early days of Civil War in 1943. Made up of simple descriptions and devoid of long historical explanations, the work is built of an economical series of vignettes, each prefaced by a date. The fabric of the past is recreated through observations like the way a child devours a rare butter cookie in wartime or how an Armenian whose shop is sacked tries to salvage sacks of spilled beans and spices, referring to the Nazis who did the damage to his store and face as “teenagers.” + Expand
Surrounded by friends and family – including her father, former Hamptons parish president James Apostolides – the author presented the book under a tent at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Hamptons on June 12. Apostolides read an excerpt from the book and talked about the process.
She began her research by interviewing – over baklava and coffee in Toronto – her grandmother Mary and aunt Loukia. She extrapolated their younger selves from their adult ones. Her grandmother, Apostolides noted, “became a girl” when describing her husband, the broad-shouldered veterinarian husband. Agamemnon reads as a hero worthy of his name, as in this description from the book where village folk gather round the veterinarian. “He – a city man, an educated man, an officer of the Greek army; he with lovely hands and pale skin, with knowledge and refinement – he was an event in their midst.” The book recreates Mary’s deep romance with that hero, but also her suffering when her husband is threatened due to his royalist ties. Near the end, a too–thin Mary lays on the floor in a gown, after failing to dissuade her husband from leaving. Her father-in-law unkindly tries to make her rise – with his boot. Apostolides writes: “Mary rose to her hands and knees. Using the kitchen chair as a ladder, she slowly stood. Strands of hair were stuck to her cheek.” As for Aunt Loukia, the author told TNH that she took the force of nature that she’s always known and made her into a spitfire of a girl.
Apostolides admitted that she was hesitated to speak to her father – the “lucky child” of the title. Addressing him at the reading, she said: “I still needed for you to be the father who had it all together.” But when the conversation started, it took far longer than her father’s prediction that, “We’ll be done before dinner.” Over six years, Apostolides shared stories that he had never even told his wife or sister. Father and daughter debated politics and whether or not the Royalists committed brutal acts too. When it came to putting him onto the page as young Taki, Apostolides faced a challenge because of the nature of the man who’d learned to be almost invisible to survive as a boy: “He is very quiet. He is not a ‘hero.’ He didn’t take action like his father.” The scenes in the book where she describes her grandfather at work were informed by all the years she spent observing her father as a veterinarian, a career decision he consciously took to honor his dead father.
Her father also traveled with the author to Greece, his first trip there since leaving. He told TNH at the event: “When I left Greece in 1949, I totally shut all the events completely, mentally. I didn’t think about any of this for 30-40 years.” But when he started talking, he said: “The amazing thing was that it was as if I had just left – that the intervening time had not happened.” Revisiting what he politely calls “very unpleasant” memories wasn’t easy he said.
The Lucky Child, says Apostolides, was a tougher sell than her first book, Inner Hunger: A Young Woman’s Struggle through Anorexia and Bulimia, for which she signed with publisher W.W. Norton while only 22 years old. But it was her new book, Apostolides said, that made her “become a writer.” In the process of writing it, she said she learned “How we create history and the identity of ourselves and our country,” and the importance of the “act of creating space for listening.” With each of three drafts, she learned to stop “gripping onto the facts” in lieu of “having an open hand and letting it unfurl on its own.” She entrusted the book, whose unusual style/structure she says reflects its oral storytelling origins, with Canadian publisher Mansfield Press.
Unlike many family accounts, which tend to warp reality for diplomatic reasons, The Lucky Child is notable for its lack of censorship. This is obvious in the author’s treatment of her grandmother Mary’s brother, Philip, who is wounded in battle, then disfigured after a suicide attempt. “Of all the characters who populate this book, Philip is the one with whom I’ve fallen deeply, madly in love,” Apostolides writes in the book’s epilogue.
In the book, Philip urges his terrified nephew Taki to ask him questions: “‘Anything. Ask me when I took a piss, or what I ate for dinner, or how many men I killed in Epirus… Ask me anything.’ Philip shook Taki’s shoulder. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘Really. It’s okay. Ask me.’”
The book – which Apostolides says is “the next generation of Nicholas Gage’s Eleni,” echoes this urgency to talk about what remains taboo. At the Hamptons, the author gave a sense of one of the benefits of visiting old wounds. “Now that it’s done, I feel at peace.” At the event, the church’s priest, Fr. Alex Karloutsos told former president James Apostolides: “Your daughter gave you a great, great honor, expressing her noble love, in noble words, in a great tribute. And you know what? You did avenge your father. You’re the man your father wanted you to be.” Apostolides takes a different turn with her next book. It will focus on the Socratic virtue of “Sophrosini” (or temperance) and feature a young pregnant belly dancer, and you can bet the author will get lucky too.
Marianne Apostolides presents her novel The Lucky Child, about her father's and grandfather's experiences during World War II and the Greek Civil War. The event took place on Long Island, NY, on June 12, 2010.
Listen to Peter Norman and Alice Burdick reading live at the spring launch of Peter Norman's At the Gates of the Theme Park in Halifax, courtesy of
CKDU FM.Zach Wells on Peter Norman's At the Gates of the Theme Park.
June 2010
Melanie Janisse On Sina Queyras's Unleashed
“What would happen if critics chose to write from a position of wonder instead?” — Sina Queyras, Unleashed
Dear Sina,
My friend Ross McKie has been after me to read your book for some time now. So, when Denis asked me to review it for Mansfield, I felt it was our proper time to meet, albeit awkwardly, here in the public domain, the sphere of the review (and as a poet/reviewer refusing to review a poet/reviewer). We mystify separately, you and I, but on similar trains heading in toward the same sun. After reading your book, I simply could not review it, so I decided instead to write you a letter.
+ MorePreface to The Nicanoriad
by Jim SmithI am going to see Nicanor Parra because together we are 154 years old. + Expand
Because I can’t remember the call number of Poems and Antipoems, it was something like PQ something something something something. Because there in the basement of basements of Douglas Library, Queen’s, where it is always 1973, I can remember it stuck its foot out and caught me in its arms, it ruffled my hair, said laugh when you think it’s funny. No, I am going to see Parra because after 11 years Stuart Ross and I sat there and joked wouldn’t it be neat to hand a copy of Back Off, Assassin! to Parra, and because I laughed ’cause that was funny. Because I went home to make Jo-Anne laugh and told her Stu’s and my little chiste, and because she said why not. And I ruffled my hair and said well maybe. No, I am going to see Parra because there is a debt that must be paid. Because all I plan to do is say thanks. And he will say ¿por que? Because I will articulate something like you gave me an example I need not follow, because you showed me there is no one way to write, because you pushed me down an alley in which the words have ruffled my hair. I am going to see Parra because I never told Samuel Beckett I loved him. Because I never made that trip to see William Burroughs. Because Pound was gone before the thought occurred to me. I am going to see Parra because it is only distance, and weather, and time. I’d like it if he would just ruffle my hair, say gee, Jim, don’t be scared. It’s just me.
Jim Smith is the author of Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Mansfield Press, 2009). He leaves for Chile to see Don Nicanor in a few weeks. He’s promised future dispatches about the trip, and the meet.
Make Mine McFadden
by Stuart RossA couple of weeks ago, Lillian Necakov, Jim Smith, Nicholas Power and I read at the St. Clair/Silverthorn Library, where Lillian is head librarian. The four of us have known each other since the 1980s, and we’ve read in various assortments, but never all of us together, so it was an evening full of both nostalgia and new experience. The venue was a nifty space on the second floor, above the library itself, and as we waited an extra fifteen minutes to begin — the whole neighbourhood had been cordoned off by police (presumably not for the reading), and we wanted to give people time to arrive — I peered out the window and saw David McFadden walking along the sidewalk toward the library. + Expand
One of the poems I had planned to read was largely about Dave, and now I wondered if I should read it, after all. I never expected him to be there! Nicholas, who was also acting as MC, started off the night, and he began one of his poems with epigraph by McFadden. Dave didn’t seem to squirm a bit, but now I really was hesitant to read that poem. A week earlier, Dave had launched his newest book, from Insomniac Press, Why Are You So Long and Sweet? Collected Long Poems of David W. McFadden, which I edited. (I’ve also had the profound honour of editing his 2008 Mansfield Press collection, Be Calm, Honey, and 2007’s Insomniac omnibus, Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems of David W. McFadden.)
Well, my turn to read came next, and I decided to go through my plan: I read the long poem that contains a section on Dave. It got a lot of laughs, but I didn’t get to see how McFadden himself had reacted.
Up next was Lillian, and, to everyone’s amazement, she too had a poem in which Dave appeared, and Jim Smith, who read last, also invoked Dave in the introduction to one of his poems. It was a quadruple-hitter. Dave seemed delighted.
Afterwards, we all gathered at the Gem for a bit of dinner. “Dave,” I said, “I just want you to know that this doesn’t happen at every reading you don’t get to. It’s not like every reading in Toronto has people reading poems about you.”
McFadden looked at me and offered up his trademark grin. That grin that suggests he knows something that we don’t know.
Stuart Ross is the editor of his fiction and poetry imprint at Mansfield, and is the co-editor, with Stephen Brockwell, of Rogue Stimulus: A Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament (Mansfield Press, 2010).
The Delights of Wood Panelling
by Leigh NashI’m a sucker for punishment; no matter how many things I have on the go, when something else amazing turns up, I can’t say no. This is how, for the last couple of Sundays, I’ve found myself in the lovely seminar room above new bookstore Of Swallows, Their Deeds, & the Winter Below, taking notes as Tony Burgess offers examples of photographic studium and punctum and wondering if he’s just making up words. + Expand
This is my first five-week course with the Toronto New School of Writing, and it likely won’t be my last. I’ve been writing poetry exclusively for over six months, and now that I’m tying up the loose ends of my manuscript I’m getting impatient to return to fiction. So this course seemed like a good fit for my headspace:
“This fiction course is composed largely of original exercises designed to encourage writers to access new ways of recording in the form of written words. These exercises are built out of German Art Historian Erwin Panofsky’s strategies for reading visual art (specifically his three strata of meaning), reconfigured as practical exercises for generating text. The course will more generally explore building a relationship between visual art practices and writing (automatic writing as life drawing, etc.). The focus of this course is to produce new writing by developing text that can record.”
The result? I’ve spent the last five weeks describing the wood-panelled walls in a commercial. And it’s really exciting. I’m no stranger to creative writing workshops —don’t hold that against me — but rarely have I encountered exercises designed to push me outside my comfort zone, to focus more on process and craft than a polished final product. It’s refreshing, and most of all it’s made my writing feel new. It’s super fun to be able to play with voice and tone, and even though I’ve only written about ten pages of babble and pre-iconographic minutiae, it’s been enough to get me excited about digging out my shelved thesis.
Leigh Nash is the author of the chapbook Landforms (Apt. 9 Press); her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye, Ukulele, is coming next fall from Mansfield Press.
MAY 2010
Guys Do It All the Time: Alessandro Porco On Meaghan Strimas’s A Good Time Had by All
Let’s just get this out of the way: I’m really digging Meaghan Strimas’s A Good Time Had by All (Exile, 2010). It’s a book filled with consistently good poems and a small few that are as high-quality as anything I’ve read recently. (It stumbles only on occasion, as I’ll mention later.) Over the last couple of weeks, as I prepared for this review, I’ve seized the opportunity to recommend it to friends. Poets like to bemoan a dearth of readers. Well, boo-hoo. With A Good Time Had by All, Strimas proves she actually deserves that readership. + More
A Translation from Jim Smith + Expand
Otto Rene Castillo
To the interrogation of fruit, flowers, bones.
I say heart, mornings, joy.
Little country of mine, blind, voiceless,
Walk with me, mountains, sing,
Invent hurricanes,
& know this, colonel:
When I burn
Only I burn.[from my translation of 4 poems by Castillo found on internet April 10, 2010]
Jim Smith is the author of Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Mansfield Press, 2009).
APRIL 2010
Two Poems: A Peter Norman Preview + Expand
Recursion
I fall awake alone. Outside,
nocturnal rain ascends.Alarms rage, summoning a thief
who hurries to the store,
unpacks his duffel sack,
replaces items on the shelf.Morning. The plane dispenses you.
We enfold each other,
celebrating your undeparture.
Tears scroll up our cheeks,
nestle into ducts.Last night we wake
sweat-soaked and sated,
breathe flame to candlewick
and fuse, hips coaxing sheets
to smoothness.Years ago, our meeting is unmade.
My life hurries back into ignorance,
days spent unrolling snowballs,
being chased by the ice cream truck,
gathering bread spat by ducks
beside a cool lake.We will never disentangle
at the baggage check.
You won’t be tugged from me
by announcements,
gates, corridors, customs.I am three years old.
I urge spilled milk into a jug,
right it on the table.
My mother’s alarmed eyes
flash calm.Outside, a robin
cocks her head,
feeds worms
to the hungry soil.Nesting Doll
A meaningless toy, it brought nightmares
that sent her shrieking into wakefulness,
summoning us or crying, simply, “Smaller!”
We’d flick off the TV and sprint upstairs
and find her shaking in her thin nightdress
soaked through with perspiration, stained with pee
or worse; and she would sob and shake and holler,
bury her face in stalwart teddy bears,
seek comfort from a toy in toys. I guess
we should have figured out the source. A father’s
job, knowing his child. I ought to be
clairvoyant of the germ causing it all,
the thing my daughter dreaded she might see:
the shape inside the doll inside the doll.Peter Norman is the author of At the Gates of the Theme Park, now available from Mansfield Press.
Dispatch From My Couch
by Marianne ApostolidesI have a favoured reading spot in my home. Sometimes it glows like a mystical oracle, possessed of all the words I’ve absorbed there these past four years, since I moved into this apartment. (My place occupies the first floor of an old High Park house; my landlords live upstairs. She’s a world-renown documentary filmmaker, he’s a writer who’s published with Coach House and Key Porter. At times of literary struggle, I’ve sent silent invocations, appealing for good creative energy transmitted via the air ducts.…) + Expand
But back to my reading spot.
That emanating, radiating, magical zone is the corner of my grey couch. I wedge myself there, a cup of double espresso awaiting me, placed on the rickety snack table I drag into position. Beside the coffee is a journal (Clairefontaine, spiral-bound: anything else feels crude), a blue pen and a glass of water. I often take notes when I read, since I tend to read philosophy these days. I’ve recently completed Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre; his thought will form the basis of my next book. From Nietzsche, I became curious about Rilke via the figure of a woman: Lou Salomé. (Although Salomé was an author in her own right, she’s best known for her associations with powerful men: Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud. Back in 1882, in the months before Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Salomé spurned his awkward, impassioned advances; she chose to sleep with his best friend instead.) Anyway, Salomé brought me to Rilke, specifically The Poetry of Rilke, translated by Edward Snow (North Point Press, 2009; Paul Vermeersch recommended Snow’s translations: thank you, Paul).
I don’t take notes while reading poetry. Usually I read poetry aloud … sort of. More accurately, I mouth the words without making sound; I’ll “hear” them this way, through the shapes they make of my mouth. This is the way I write, too: I compose longhand, then edit as I silent-speak the words, seeking a sense of fuller meaning through language’s movement within my body. At any rate, I don’t take notes while I read poetry. But I will write my impressions afterward in that Clairefontaine journal, using my blue ballpoint pen. And then I’ll get up and stretch my limbs and gulp my water. And later, at night, I will take my position on that couch again. This time, however, I’ll sit in the centre, flanked by my two kids: my daughter will curl into the corner spot, and my son will curl into me. As I read, aloud, a YA book whose complexities are wrapped in beautiful innocence, I will occasionally consider Nietzsche’s reconceptualization of morality, or Rilke’s milky constellation of lover/mother/poet/creator, and I will be thankful.
Marianne Apostolides recently launched her second novel, The Lucky Child (Mansfield Press, 2010). She lives in Toronto.
Poetry on the Way
by Leigh NashI recently started working at a new job that requires me to commute on the subway for half an hour, morning and evening, in and around rush hour. That in itself is disorienting, as I’ve spent the better part of the last three years working freelance, often not getting dressed before noon and sometimes going a couple of days without leaving the house. (Really. Turns out I am one of those people who’ll spend all day in her pjs, happily.)+ Expand
The one upside of commuting is that I’m reading more. A lot more: novels and non-fiction―and especially poetry. I’ve discovered I love reading poetry on the subway. There’s something so satisfying about reading poems while rocking along underground; I catch myself slowing down or speeding up so I can flip the page in time with the train’s stops and starts, and with the reorganizing and shuffling required by the swirls of rush-hour traffic. And it’s easy to pick up in the evening where you’ve left off in the morning.
Since it’s National Poetry Month, this is my challenge to you, dear Revue reader: give up the novel, the newspaper and the iPod, just for the next few weeks, and pick up a book of poetry to read during your commute. My first commuting book was Heather McHugh’s Upgraded to Serious; if you don’t know where to start, why not take a look at award shortlists, such as the recently announced Griffin, Lowther and Lampert―which includes the Mansfield title Something Burned Along the Southern Border (Robert Earl Stewart). Or, if you’re not quite ready to give up your iPod, head on over to Seen Reading to download readings by Michael Lista (Bloom), Dani Couture (Sweet) and Susan Holbrook (Joy Is So Exhausting), all of which are definitely more exciting than listening to TTC stop announcements.
Leigh Nash is the author of the poetry collection Goodbye, Ukulele, coming next fall from Mansfield Press, and the co-editor of the chapbook press The Emergency Response Unit.
Jesse Patrick Ferguson discusses Peter Norman's poem "Playground Incident"
12 or 20 questions: with Diana Fitzgerald Bryden
MARCH 2010
Debunking the Myth of Newness
Gregory Betts reviews David Shield's Reality Hunger: A ManifestoDavid Shields — prize-winning author and almost New York Times bestseller — has a new book out that contemporary prose writers would be well advised to consult, if only to surrender themselves to an onslaught of insight into and provocations concerning what and why we write (regardless of whether it be labelled fiction or non-fiction). The book regularly returns to its central premise that the generic categories of prose are actually and fundamentally arbitrary and misleading, especially in this the memoir (or life-writing, as we call it here) age. As he writes, “149: All the best stories are true.” Fiction and non-fiction are the same. + More
From the Preface to Exit Interviews, a work in progress
by Jim Smith
INSTRUCTIONS
Take a name from Column 1, match it to the correct age in Column 2, and match that to the correct cause of death in Column 3. + Expand
COLUMN 1
bpNichol; Roque Dalton; Vladimir Mayakovsky; Federico Garcia Lorca; Jack Spicer; Leonel Rugama; Daniel Jones; Arthur Rimbaud; Paul Eluard; Ed Dorn; Charles Baudelaire; Gregory Corso; Pablo Neruda; Joe Brainard; Ted Berrigan; Frank O’Hara; David Aylward; Otto René Castillo; Charles Olson; Milton Acorn.
COLUMN 246; 70; 33; 59; 38; 35; 20; 70; 63; 44; 49; 36; 52; 56; 46; 37; 45; 40; 69; 40.
COLUMN 3
a ruptured spleen after being hit by a dune buggy; cancer of the leg; heart attack then diabetic complications; sudden blood loss during an operation; shot during a siege by soldiers; cancer of the prostate; heart attack; complications from a life full of meth; heart failure related to cancer of the prostate; self-inflicted gunshot; beaten to death by fascists; liver cancer; by choice; cancer of the pancreas; alcoholism; shot by members of his own party; by choice; stroke and paralysis; pneumonia from AIDS; burned alive after four days of torture.
Jim Smith is the author, most recently, of Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Mansfield Press). He lives in Toronto and is at work on about a hundred different projects.
FEBRUARY 2010
Reticent Bodies by Moez Surani
reviewed by Jacob McArthur MooneyMoez Surani’s Reticent Bodies is an energetic, poetically dextrous first collection that speaks to a new talent able to borrow liberally from a great assortment of past voices, without ever being subsumed by them. Returning to the dusty traditions of love and loss, of abstractions made real by the force of his descriptions, Surani stands out amid the microscope-wielding fetishists of the quantifiable world that have dominated his generation of Canadian poets. This uniqueness of worldview is carried on a talent robust enough to move, in the course of a single line, from the specific to the global, and from the personal to the political, without ever losing sight of his target or forgetting to employ his ferocious and adaptable wit. + More
Revisiting Di Cicco
Essay by Denis De KlerckAs a young writer, Walt Whitman famously reviewed his own work in the New York papers, describing the first edition of Leaves of Grass as “transcendent and new.” As it happened, he was right about himself, but in general it’s not wise to pretend objectivity when your bias is bound to be discovered by posterity. This is especially true if you don’t intend to hide behind the skirts of an unsigned review. So how about publishers? Would they be credible when writing about a book they have paid to produce? “Sort of” would be my definitive response—at least as far as the work of Pier Giorgio Di Cicco is concerned. + More
I wish they’d had YouTube in 1787. Instead, all we have is a period illustration of a curious fencing exhibition match held on April 9, 1787, in Carlton House, England. + Expand
The fellow in the red jacket is the Prince of Wales. He arranged such matches for gambling and entertainment purposes.
It may look like a cartoon. It’s not. The match was between the once-best swordsmen in Europe. A false Chevalier and a real. Both with a connection to Marie Antoinette.
To the left is 45-year-old Georges Boulogne, called the Chevalier de Saint Georges but unable to hold that honour as a mixed-race son of a wealthy landowner and a Guadeloupean slave. His father brought him to France at four, enrolled him in an elite fencing academy at 13. He was a continentally renowned swordsman by 19, a first violinist by 26, one of the first composers of string quartets, a symphony conductor by 28. Lieutenant of the Hunt for the Duc D’Orleans at the French court, he tutored Marie Antoinette in piano and became the first black freemason. Years after this match, he organized and led a military unit of 1,000 black men in support of the French Revolution, assisted by his protégé Alexandre Dumas (father of the novelist), himself also the son of a French diplomat and an African slave.
To the right is 59-year-old Count Charles d’Éon de Beaumont—soldier, diplomat and spy. The story is that, as a young man on the King’s orders, he had infiltrated the court of the Russian Empress Elizabeth by posing as one of her female attendants. Later, now dressed as a man, he conducted peace negotiations in England. This new Chevalier was the Crown’s Minister Plenipotentiary. A hundred thousand pounds was wagered in clubs about his gender. A decade later, Louis XV dead and him in disfavour, he was forced to return to France and to agree to live out his life dressed as a woman. Marie Antoinette provided access to her seamstress. And for the next 40 years he lived quietly with another woman, as a woman.
Toronto’s Tafelmusik Ensemble and CBC both staged Boulogne’s music a few years back; D’Éon has been lionized as a cross-dressing pioneer and as the subject of a popular Japanese anime series. Who won the match? Some sources say the Chevalier de Saint Georges; some say the Count D’Éon.
Jim Smith is the author of Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Mansfield Press, 2009).
Jim Smith models the latest in fashion stylings for any self-respecting assassin. He stands in front of Robert Fones' lush artwork for David McFadden's long poem The Poet's Progress.
JANUARY 2010
The Certainty Dream by Kate Hall
reviewed by Nyla MatukA book about dreams, and about certainty, needs a Familiar. That is, it needs something the mind returns to and recalls, a touchstone that shape-shifts and interrogates familiarity and certainty, allowing readers to contemplate the opposite of certainty in dream logic, i.e., possibility. In Kate Hall’s The Certainty Dream, a mynah-bird figure stands for certainty and possibility—two central polarities in the book. + More
Jim Smith: Neruda Saves Lives!
What poet described Chile as a long, thin ship? Neruda. + Expand
What poet was nominated for the Chilean presidency in 1970, but in the end threw his support to Salvador Allende? Neruda.
Same poet who 31 years before was personally responsible for saving over 2,200 lives. Neruda. Here’s the scoop.
As the tragic endgame of the Spanish Civil War played itself out in and around Barcelona in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Republicans tried to flee across the border into France. Those who made it found themselves imprisoned in concentration camps. France was taking no chance of angering its new fascist neighbour.
Neruda convinced the Chilean president to appoint him Special Consul in Paris for Immigration. He found an old French cargo ship, the Winnipeg, that had been making the Marseilles–North Africa run for years, fitted out for no more than 20 passengers. He had
it modified to hold thousands.He, his wife and a few others set to reviewing and assembling the passenger list. One of the goals was to reunite broken families that had ended up in different camps.
On September 3, 1939, the Winnipeg departed for Chile. A month later the ship arrived in Valparaiso.
Neruda wrote at the time that if the critics erased all his other poems, the poem that was the Winnipeg could never be erased.
Most of those who remained in the French camps met the same fate as Lorca had two years earlier.
Jim Smith is the author of Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems. He writes, “I am collecting odd anecdotes about writers for a potential new project. If you have some nifty little piece of information, I’d be pleased as Punch to hear from you! Here’s a bonus one — the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton is the direct descendant of one of the Dalton gang, who fled south following the Jesse James fiasco. Write me c/o info@mansfieldpress.net.”
Stuart Ross: Into The Spring ...
In Mansfield’s 2010 spring list, for the first time ever, poetry, fiction and non-fiction will be represented. One of each, in fact. + Expand
First, there’s the long-awaited literary survey by Amy Lavender Harris—Imagining Toronto. The last few chapters are just coming in, and this is going to be a real landmark book, appealing both to the serious reader and to the academic. Amy has gathered an enormous collection of books set in and about Toronto, and her journey through them is absorbing and provocative.
Next, we’re proud to be publishing the debut poetry collection by Peter Norman, a writer who has lived in Vancouver, Calgary, and Ottawa, and now resides in Halifax. The book is called At the Gates of the Theme Park, and it’s a real mind-twister. Peter is also a writer of short stories and novels, and I believe this book will kick off a very busy and exciting literary career. (OK, actually, the career has already been kicked off with a couple of great poetry chapbooks, one written in collaboration with Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, but At the Gates of the Theme Park will kick off the vertebrate part of Peter’s career.)
Finally, this spring will also see the launch of Marianne Apostolides’ second novel, The Lucky Child. Marianne first novel, Swim, was published last year by the very fine publisher BookThug and quickly went into a second printing. The Lucky Child is a very different kind of book, delving into the history of Greece in the last century, but it’s equally smart and compulsively readable. Look for it on March 25—Greek Independence Day!
It’s comforting to know that as the Mansfield team (that’s publisher Denis De Klerck, editorial assistant Leigh Nash and me) work toward the new season, our 2009 books—poetry by Pier Giorgio di Cicco, Jim Smith and Robert Stewart, and a novel by Tom Walmsley—are finding their way into appreciative hands. The December launch at the Monarch Tavern in Toronto was a blast, with guest readings by Corrado Paina and David W. McFadden. Watch for readings by Mansfield writers in a venue near you.
Stuart Ross is Poetry Editor at Mansfield Press. His short-story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009) appeared on a Top 10 for 2009 list while also being declared the Worst Book of 2009. That makes him happy.
Watch Joe Rosenblatt read from Dog at the AB Series in Ottawa.
Read a rave review of David W. McFadden's Why Are You So Sad? (Edited by Mansfield's own Stuart Ross). Want more? McFadden's latest book, Be Calm, Honey (Mansfield Press, 2008) was a finalist for the 2009 Governor General's Literary Award.
DECEMBER 2009
Harmonics by Jesse Patrick Ferguson
reviewed by Jonathan BallHarmonics surprised me. I thought I knew Ferguson’s work, from my time editing dandelion, where I published his visual poetry, some of which I used for one of the journal’s more eye-catching covers. When a friend at Freehand said she had acquired his first book of poetry, I assumed too much. I assumed the book would contain a sizeable amount of visual poetry, alongside unconventional pieces that would bear the influence of experimentalist work. But the book is quite conventional. It consists of typical lyrical poems, notable not for any formal innovation but for the assurance with which Ferguson writes. + More
Christopher Doda on Light Verse
This past October I had the pleasure of participating in Margaret Christakos’s Influency class at the University of Toronto, an ongoing forum where poets lecture on each other’s work and interact with the students (Margaret actually has groupies for this — devoted students who have taken the class in each of its seven annual installments). During the question period after I read, I found myself briefly defending my use of humour in poetry (I use humour to break up the bleak or overtly intellectual nature of my poems). While I found it odd that someone would specifically ask about the use of humour in my work, it got me thinking about the fate of light verse in general. + Expand
Over the summer, I purchased a bookcase (a constant need around my house) at my local Goodwill and as I was carrying it five blocks home I passed one of the many junkshops on St. Clair Avenue. In amongst the ceramic jugs, boxes of old silverware, figurines of matadors, muses and Moses, comic books, REO Speedwagon records and other deleterious material outside, I spotted from the corner of my eye a book title: Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing. That was enough to stop my labours right there. I forked over a loonie and tossed the book on the shelf and completed my journey home. The book is by one Samuel Hoffenstein (1890-1947), a screenwriter who worked on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Wizard of Oz, Enchanted April and Give My Regards to Broadway, among other films. Covered with laudatory comments from H. L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker, this hardback was released in 1941 but copyrighted in 1928, a 15th printing. I consider myself to be a person with a better than average grasp of 20th-century poetry, yet I’d never heard of this book, a poetry collection that went to at least 15 printings! The poems in this 220-page volume are in rhyme and meter and largely satirical or comical, which is likely the main reason why they’ve fallen into obscurity.
Generally, what is called light verse is not seen as deep by most poetry readers. I can’t think of a critic anywhere who would argue that Ogden Nash, Edward Lear, Richard Wilbur, Wendy Cope or Christian Morgenstern are as important to the last hundred years of poetry as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden or William Carlos Williams. Shakespeare’s comedies are rarely given the critical attention paid to his tragedies. Hell, even the Oscars reward drama over comedy every time, even though most actors claim comedy is harder to do.
This is a shame. Certainly in Canada, we are pretty shy on humorous poets: Irving Layton sometimes tried to be funny (or at least clever) and inevitably failed, Margaret Atwood is venomously serious and Michael Ondaatje her straight man, Anne Michaels is just plain dour and Anne Carson, Margaret Avison, Louis Dudek, Lorna Crozier and P. K. Page seem to have had their funny bones surgically removed. I doubt Carmine Starnino ever had a funny bone to begin with, as either poet or critic. Al Purdy had moments of humour (especially his hilarious “Attempt”), but they are few and far between. And yet we have a professional comedian, John Wing Jr., who has published several collections of bitterly funny poems in relative obscurity.
But the humorous poets mentioned above have just as much, if not more, to tell us about human nature as the deathly serious Robert Lowell. By focusing on mankind’s foibles and follies, on our pretensions and our failures, they are closer to expressing most people’s thoughts and experiences than the terminally suicidal Sylvia Plath. Myself, I write a great deal of light verse, mostly occasional poems for friends, that I never think of publishing. Perhaps I have the same problem. I suppose we just don’t take light verse at all seriously.
Christopher Doda is the author of Aesthetics Lessons and Among Ruins.
A selection of writings by the 5 Mansfield authors reading on December 9 as part of Mansfield Press' Holiday Book Launch
"Relationships" from Early Works
by Pier Giorgio Di CiccoRelationships
Everywhere they are talking about
relationships, though they hate the word,
though no one visibly vomits over it, and
everyone sneaks it into the conversation, using
the word for the sake of, you understand, convenience.
Everyone is talking about it. Primary, secondary
relationships, bad relationships, short-term
ones, long-term, relationships that
couldn’t work out, unhealthy relationships,
monogamous ones, a relationship lasting two or
three years, two or three minutes, a sexual
relationship, my favourite, phrase that is.
Relationships they work at, comfortable relationships,
the first big relationship, the relationship
I’m into now, the positive relationship, the
negative, a relationship based on understanding,
the relationship that’s falling apart, the
strong relationship, the superficial relationship,
the relationship between two people, an honest
relationship, the mature relationship, the dead
relationship, the new relationship – though no
one likes the word, everyone uses it, all on
related ships, on ships with some
relations, relative hips, relating, shipping
some off to relatives, relishing tips on how
to have better relations.
Everywhere
they are talking relationships
and not having them, having them and not
liking them. Everywhere they are using
the dirty word. Relation ships us all off
to lonely places. In love – no one is in love;
they’re working at the thing, committing, cementing,
forming attachments – it’s all a bunch of
brickwork, constructing a sound relationship,
ironing out problems, breaking down barriers,
making a firm foundation, picking up the pieces
from a relationship. We are all frustrated masons.
Let’s all build a good relationship and
crawl into it, lets all drag in ex-lovers
and bore each other to death, discussing it.
Let’s discuss it and not do it, let’s not and
say we did – let’s be really careful about it so
a brick doesn’t fall on our heads.Let’s look at a whole bunch of empty
rooms and discuss it;
let’s get really old waiting
for a relationship that’s right; let’s
write more articles on relationships and
feel liberal, bohemian, enlightened.
Let’s become the ministry of relationships,
the high priests of it, let’s really get
down on our knees and bark at the moon,
meaning love, meaning the oval, heavy syllable
spilling out of our mouths and onto the
grass; let’s wonder why sixteen-year-olds
are wary, conservative, going into law
instead of english. Let’s wonder how long
before we’re out there, pushing buttons,
not knowing other ways to say I love you,
wrapping up the foetus of fireballs.
When did we start discussing? What's this relationship –
this one-night stand with the earth?"The Memory of India" from Souls in Plain Clothes
by Corrado PainaThe Memory of India
It was not too long ago or maybe it was a long time ago
but not enough to erase the memory
of a place where I have been
where the dream laid its body
where my hunger was terminatedIn this place I felt my humanity
my strong and uncompromising flesh
I have never been to India
but I have memory of Indiaevery tribunal in this land would condemn me
for pretending
I ask for the right to collect and treasure
the memories of places I have never been
of the man I have never been
of the dreams I have never had"Assassin Take One" from Back Off, Assassin! New & Selected Poems
by Jim SmithAssassin Take One
I keep Gene Day in a file folder in the basement.
My mother is a pile of letters and two casserole dishes on top of a bookshelf.
Arnie is in an urn waiting to be mixed with mine plus a sprinkle in the backyard he lay in.
Merril is some smudged pix, and a book by her granddaughter that mentions me once.
Sad brother Kim is his “K” keychain and a Cream disc I’ll never ask why he had.
bp is one deadication, two anecdotes, a warm feeling, the rest appropriated years ago.
Richard Swanton our union friend and precocious AIDS dier, I have his key to our Robarts staff room.
These bits are basement tenants
Who’ve never paid a cent in rent.Many of us have little piles of stuff.
Many have not a fucking thing.Me, I’ve tried to forget myself
One dimension at a time.
I’m down to four now
So back off, assassin,
I’m shitting trinkets as fast as I can."Fuselage, Manitoba" from Something Burned Along the Southern Border
by Robert Earl StewartFuselage, Manitoba
That there were more wrecked planes around here than bears
was a fact not lost on them. They wrote to their wives
to advise they would be squatting
on Crown Land in a nose cone (send liquor).
The closest dwellings had boards hammered through
with nails covering every orifice. The wildflowers
below the windows were often bent with black gore,
and even some bright red.
When they asked the guide if skeletons were
ever found in the wrecks that speckled the
terrain like different-coloured pins,
he said: "Bears take care of that."
Airplane steel gaping like a foil chip bag –
windows and hatches flung or disappeared,
giving up secrets of luggage evolution,
presenting a spread of plush seats,
major traumatic flaws shiny after the rain;
occasionally, wings and tails.
They decided they'd rather risk emaciated bears –
one's giving up a lucrative practice in sedation dentistry;
the other a lucrative career in insurance fraud –
than fall prey to the dispersal
pattern of grounded bait in a self-fulfilling
treeline economy (send adult things).
A poll of their friends would've revealed: 1)
neither was known as a photographer;
and 2) they would be picked clean (send regards).An excerpt from Dog Eat Rat
by Tom WalmsleyTrip met Ginger during a strike at a medical supply plant. The night was hot and the picket line was silent. She saw him crossing the parking lot and waved him over.
I don’t know you, she said.
Your loss, said Trip.
I don’t doubt it. Want to sit with me?
She sat in darkness at the wheel of her van. All he could see was the bottom half of her face and the red light of her video camera.
I’m teamed up with that young kid, the guy in the U of T jacket.
He’ll live, Ginger said.
I don’t want to just dump him.
Maybe he wants to sleep. What’s his name?
Aidan.
She radioed Aidan and told him he was on his own while Trip opened the door and slid in beside her. She turned her head and looked out the window until the door shut. Before the light went out he saw she was a redhead.
I thought Rodney was the boss.
He owns the business, Ginger said. I’m in charge of investigations. And investigators.
First time I’ve seen you here, he said. He didn’t add that he would have remembered, but he would have remembered.
You’re breathing hard.
Your fault, said Trip.
Ginger was working as a rover on two strikes and spending all her time driving between parking lots. Trip hardly heard her tell him and he was more aware of her breathing than he was of what she said. She was damp with sweat and he liked her smell. He was drenched.
I said, how do you like it so far?
I’ve never been on this side of a picket line, he said.
What’s your regular line of work?
I write haiku, said Trip. Thousands of them.
Ginger nodded and decided to ask him later. A writer of some kind. If you ask a man to repeat his occupation, he’ll explain the whole job instead.
They both wished they could see each other more clearly. She told him he’d have to buy a car if he wanted permanent work with the company and he didn’t volunteer a response. Silence covered them like the heat. Ginger thought about opening her mouth and artlessly letting words jump out. She felt like a dog who’d caught up with the car and now had no idea what to do with it.
That’s a cool thing to tell me, Trip said.
Holy shit, she said. Did I say it? I’m getting punchy.
Turn on the light so I can see your face.
Forget it, Ginger said. It’s almost three a.m. And it’s a fucking awful light.
She had just begun moving closer when he asked her for gum. She had none. She dug around in her purse and found a couple of chipped and darkened mints. He picked them out of her hand and put them into his mouth. Trip sucked hard while she tried to think of something to say and then he crunched and swallowed the mints.
They both moved in at the same moment and had a wet, clumsy kiss. The mints interfered with the taste of each other. They tried it again.
We can’t do anything here, she said.
We’re already doing it.
I can’t get caught. Can you come home with me?
His breath made her think of drunk investigators, Rodney meeting a client, the mailman. Mint breath. The taste was covering something, but not booze. Food? This guy is married, probably, with two sullen kids. Or a clingy girlfriend waiting up for him. He was insulting her by thinking it over.
Listen, she said.
I’ve got some stuff in the car. I’ll have to go get it.
So what’s the problem?
No problem, said Trip. I’m thinking in slow motion.
He took her face in both hands and kissed her. If a guy was a bad kisser you’d better stop right there. She knew it but she never let it stop her. Advice was what you gave friends.
He was a good kisser. She could hardly taste the mints or anything else."Sonnet 34" from Be Calm, Honey
by David W. McFaddenWe've often heard it said that cockroaches
have little appreciation for good music.
Don't believe it for a moment, dear friend.
Today I put a slice of bread in the toaster
and when the toaster started to get hot
out from under it came a good-size roach
and sat there frozen in the growing heat.
It probably thought its time had come.Because we're kind we'd never kill a cockroach
(though we're not above tormenting them to death).
I merely sprinkled holy water on this bug
then blew warm air his way and he didn't budge.
But when I hummed "Danny Boy" in his face
you should have seen his antennae keeping time.
NOVEMBER 2009
Torque on the Image: Receiving Damian Rogers' "Paper Radio."
review by Jeff LatosikPaper Radio is the debut collection from Damian Rogers, a former arts editor at Eye Weekly and recent writer-in-residence at openbook Toronto. Over the past year, she’s maintained a conspicuous presence in Canadian magazines; her collection comes amid one of the most diverse fall lists in recent memory. I wouldn’t be surprised if this collection finds a receptive audience both within and without the poetry community—no easy task, to be sure. Her poems are warm and inviting; they are also subtle and considered. + More
Robert Earl Stewart Visits LaSalle's Farenheit Festival of Fire
LaSalle, Ontario, is exactly the kind of buttoned-down town where you’d expect a festival of burning sculpture to have a snowball’s chance in hell when it comes to finding an audience. + Expand
Luckily for the Fahrenheit Festival of Fire, crashing and burning in a small town constitutes an unqualified success. The festival marks the one night a year LaSalle lets its hair down and admits it’s cool to burn stuff to the ground. Especially art.
Armed with camera and notebook and acting in my official capacity as a newspaperist (I resist the title journalist), I was circulating among the more than 2,000 people who crowded the weed- and wildflower-choked hills surrounding a huge water-retention pond on the 189-acre grounds of LaSalle’s Vollmer Culture and Recreation Complex for the annual night of municipally sanctioned arson. Artists from across Ontario and Michigan were on hand to take a torch to their creations of wood and straw, which were arranged like giant confections in a bakery window along a spit of land extending out into the retention pond.
Despite rampant fire dancing and flame swallowing, the Big Burn (as it’s known to accelerant enthusiasts and bonfire mavens) is strangely low on the bacchanal scale; an eerily silent affair, like sitting around a big, baroque campfire—no one quite sure how to respond as sculptures that took teams of artists days to create are reduced to heaps of smouldering wreckage. It is only then that a sculpture is considered a complete work of art.
The most dynamic and beautiful fire sculpture to light up the late September night was a piece by a group of students from the University of Windsor called “Fire House” (a single-room structure built on a pontoon raft, a chair in the middle of the room). Once fully engulfed, the house was cut adrift from shore. As it burned out on the lagoon, several small vessels lit out from it and sailed quietly across the night-black surface—nothing but a faint crackling, and no one remembers them reaching the far shore, if they did at all.
Robert Earl Stewart is the author of Something Burned Along the Southern Border, out this month from Mansfield Press.
OCTOBER 2009
God of Missed Connections
review by Spencer Gordon“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” So says Stephen Dedalus, famously, in Joyce’s Ulysses. To the speaker of Elizabeth Bachinsky’s God of Missed Connections, history can indeed be nightmarish — the hard facts of torture and war and famine; the inability to solve or resolve its contradictions and cruelties. + More
Christopher Doda Muses on Poetic Setlists
Over the Labour Day weekend I was lucky enough to spend time at a friend’s cottage in the area around Minden, Ontario. I was even luckier to be introduced to the nearby “World’s Smallest Bookstore,” a modest building on the edge of the highway with about seven upright shelving units. With low expectations of finding nothing but airport trash, I was pleasantly surprised to find the place stocked entirely with quality literature. Moreover, I never met the owner, as the store operates on an honour system: you are asked to pay $3 per book into a strong box and write down what titles you’ve purchased (I tried to imagine how long it would take for unscrupulous book dealers to clean the place out with no remuneration if such an operation were tried in Toronto) before you leave. + Expand
Among the items I located was a 1969 Selected Poems of Irving Layton, signed by the author — a pretty good value for three bucks. Upon further inspection, I wasn’t so enchanted with the signature (after all, Layton was hardly Thomas Pynchon when it came to public appearances and signed books of his are not hard to come by) as I was with something written in the front by the book’s first owner. In an undoubtedly feminine hand, there appears on the blank verso page before the half-title: “Bought May 3/72, ROM bookstore Toronto, after hearing Mr. Layton read a selection of his poems in the Museum Theatre from 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm. He read…” followed by Layton’s set list for the performance. His poems included some of his quality material like “The Improved Binoculars” and “The Death of Moishe Lazarovitch,” along with showier pieces like “Why I Don’t Make Love to the First Lady.”
First off: they used to have poetry readings at the ROM, which was news to me. Second, I’ve attended hundreds of poetry readings in my life, purchased books at many, and never once thought of doing what this listener did that evening in 1972: write down what was read in the book itself. For those of us with a passing interest in book history, this is a valuable record as, while it does not show provenance, it does give some idea of the circumstances under which the book was purchased. Furthermore, I’ve seen a few other books from that era similarly marked up, which makes me wonder if this wasn’t a convention of serious poetry readers from a bygone time.
Christopher Doda is the author of Aesthetics Lesson and Among Ruins.
Raining in Vancouver but on the edge of leaving here, flying back to chilly Edmonton today, then tomorrow driving the Yellowhead to a metal festival in Calgary for the weekend. Hard to write on the road, I find. I need the routine of black coffee, domesticity, a view of the berm from my window where usually I’m standing by the stove working on my web collaboration with photographer Paul Saturley, a collection of “sliver fictions” called Food I Ate with Frank or poems for Truss on freaks. Bolstering such leaps are books like Geek Love, the diary of May Sarton’s 70th year, Canadian sonnets and Paglia’s Sexual Personae. + Expand
Anticipating November already when I set out on tour for Frenzy, a book of muse-quests from Anvil Press. I’ll take DOG with me too and continue drafting epistles to Joe Rosenblatt for our mad correspondence called Hoofprints in the Snow as I shuttle between trains and planes on the way to St John’s.
Sometimes it’s as if I exist in an urge to translate the whole world into language. Other days, there’s just this familiar weather, silence.
Catherine Owen is the co-author, with poet Joe Rosenblatt and photographer Karen Moe, of Dog.
Stuart Ross on what's in store for Mansfield
The summer and lead-up to fall has been pretty frenzied at Mansfield. This week, three great books go the printer: Something Burned Along the Southern Border, the debut collection by an exciting Windsor poet, Robert Earl Stewart; Back Off, Assassin! New & Selected Poems (I love that title!), by Jim Smith, whose often outrageous readings exhilarated and offended back in the ’80s and ’90s, before he took a decade-long break from the writing scene, and whose return I am deeply thrilled about; and Dog Eat Rat, a spare and stunning new novel by Tom Walmsley, the renowned playwright and poet whose first fiction, Doctor Tin, won the debut 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest back in 1978. (Tom also wrote the introduction to my own first 3-Day Novel, Father, the Cowboys Are Ready to Come Down from the Attic, which was the almost-win of the no-winner 1979 contest.) + Expand
Two more excellent books will make their way from the Mansfield office to the printer this season: Early Works, by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, which resurrects his intriguing collections Virgin Science and Flying Deeper into the Century, and Amy Lavender Harris’s groundbreaking work Imagining Toronto, a lively and exhaustive survey of literature about Hogtown.
Stay tuned for news of launches for these books in Toronto and elsewhere, later this fall. And stay tuned, as well, for news of our spring titles: we’ve got a great debut and a fabulous return lined up so far.
And, finally, Mansfield is thrilled to be, for the first time, a recommender for the Ontario Arts Council’s invaluable Writers’ Reserve Program, through which writers directly approach Ontario literary presses and magazines for funding recommendations. It’s going to mean an awful lot of extra work in the next few months, but I’m looking forward to going through the submissions, discovering the work of writers I’m not familiar with and seeing what writers I know are up to.
Stuart Ross is the Poetry Editor for Mansfield Press.
SEPTEMBER 2009
Melle Mel Visited Jerusalem but Missed the Meaning
review by Alessandro PorcoBetween 1932 and 1938, while in exile, Walter Benjamin composed his Berlin Childhood Around 1900, a series of vignettes about growing up in the city. The vignettes first appeared, under a pseudonym, in newspapers and journals and were later published posthumously in an edition arranged by Adorno. + More
Oneiric
Review by Robert Earl Stewart“All nights are like postcards.”
This line appears, rather innocuously, in “Barbados Hotel, Almost Empty,” the second poem in Oneiric, Toronto-based poet Nyla Matuk’s debut collection. Sandwiched between “a lone Panama hat / drunk at the bar” and a karaoke performer belting Elvis into the tiki-bar night, the line can almost be glossed over, its significance to this dream-obsessed collection missed — lost between poetic details that straddle the border between painfully real and darkly comic. But which is painful? The karaoke Elvis or the drunken tourist? For that matter, which is comic? Which dark? Which real? + More
In Memoriam: Kuldip Gill (1934-2009)
It is with great sadness that we note the passing of author Kuldip Gill on May 10, 2009, in Abbotsford at the age of 75. Gill was a contributor to our 2004 Mansfield collection Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets (eds. Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal). She had recently authored Valley Sutra, a collection of poetry forthcoming from Caitlin Press in fall 2009. + More
New poetry from Lillian Necakov
The Human Hairpin
Now this guy’s name
I can rememberwhat I mean to say is
there is a thought
sort of like a daisy chain
but more like a paper clip chain
willing its way out of me
but I can’t remember what to say to you
something about hawks
and blue jays
maybe bongo drums
I don’t know what to explain first
the not of knowing
or the knowing I don’t know?1908 was his best year
and
he pitched against the White Sox
in a Chicago where your shadow was not yet stretched
across its streetssomething is flying out of my pocket
today is earth day
-there is a miserable wind-
and shouldn’t it be every day?
like fedoras and loafers
baseball and the wireless
lemonade on the porch
shouldn’t we be happy just this once
Addie Joss happy
pitchin’ against the White Sox happy
just this once
despite the curve ball
waiting
’round the corner.Lillian Necakov is the author of The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press, 2007). Her work has appeared recently or is soon to appear in Exile and This Magazine.
JULY 2009
The Velocity of Escape
review by Evie ChristieJim Johnstone’s debut collection, The Velocity of Escape, is rife with peculiar, redolent detail. The jacket text points out for us the occurrences of “Siamese twins, circus performers, burn victims and scientists” and their uncommon link with “rhetorical science.” + More
The Imagined City
by Amy Lavender HarrisThings float into your head when you write. Words lodge there; ideas, images, whole paragraphs coming to rest the way driftwood accumulates at the lake edge after a storm. With the right collection of words you can create structures solid enough to dwell in. You can invent people to live in them, and communities for them to inhabit. You can imagine an entire city. + More
Jason Heroux visits Hotel Dieu Hospital
I’m in the Hotel Dieu Hospital emergency waiting room, waiting for my name to be called. It’s the end of spring, beginning of summer, and I’ve been at this hospital a lot lately after a recent operation to have an abscess lanced and drained. + Expand
Today, as usual, the room is crowded with people in various kinds of pain. Most of us are reading old magazines, clutching the glossy pages in our hands, and the tightly gripped magazines all look like they’re in pain too. An old man sits in the corner, groaning quietly to himself. His drained face looks like a cigarette butt that’s been tossed to the ground. A cigarette butt that wants to be picked up again, there’s still a little smoke left in it, still a little fire. The woman across from me cradles an icepack against her ear like a cell phone. Outside, the rain falls to the ground without feeling a thing. I stare down at the floor and glance at everybody’s shoes. How loose and delicate all the different shoelaces look tied in their hasty knots. It’s almost heartbreaking. The fragile knots of our shoelaces look like they don’t have the strength to last through the day. It’s the end of spring, beginning of summer, and we’re all waiting for our names to be called.
Catherine Owen: On "siting" oneself and other fabulations
I’ve had my own website since 2003. Initially, it was a compendium of “everything I've done,” an exhaustingly unreadable mishmash of muses and manuscripts, photographs and pursuits. I even tried to upload each review I’d written, every essay, and provide a sample poem from each of my books. In 2009, while I’m still a technophobe of sorts, I know enough about the web to understand a bit more about what’s palatable in terms of number of visuals and the amount of words on a “page.” Thus, I asked Chris, my life companion, partner in music and website creator, to reconfigure the material on the site, make it a little more lively, a lot more engaging, a portal rather than an archive. + Expand
At the same time, the aim remained to reflect the diversity, the variety of my life in art. Not only are my professional activities as a poet, or even as a tutor/workshop leader profiled, but also my amateur photography, for instance, more perhaps because my way of seeing the world influences the way I enter the written word than because of my desire that this practice be valorized in and of itself. Additionally, my solo work is highlighted, but the collaborative work I've increasingly engaged in over the past six years is also now a dominant aspect of the site. No poet creates in isolation; no poet has one source or interest set. Revealing the multiple sides of a working artist’s life is my primary intent here. I used to want to hide my hardcore musical interests from my academic colleagues and conceal the fact that I have a Master’s degree from my fellow headbangers. The site draws all these passions together. It also pays homage more to my living, active collaborators, to what is vital in my life right now, than erecting virtual shrines to the dead Muses I once honoured or attempting to compile trajectories: photos of childhood, for instance, or pictures from the beginning of my performative vocation.
I've always been addicted to nostalgia. While my original site strained to capture this perhaps beautiful sickness, the revamped version, shaped in the era of Facebook and post a hard-drive crash, which led to the loss of years and years of memorabilia, seeks to mark more current consuming embroilments, only offering brief or submerged tracings of what came before. I’ve detached a lot since 2003. The more one creates, the more one must cast away. What is retained only time tells in its weird, unpredictable tickings. The mystery is that we remain ineffable, more and more so as we become increasingly accessible, naked on the screen like fish in their glaringly transparent bubble homes, too slippery to grasp.
Stuart Ross reports in on Mansfield's fall list
It’s been a mad spring and early summer. While launching my own new book, the story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books), in Vancouver, the Kootenays, Calgary, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Red Deer, and Edmonton, I’ve been working, mostly remotely, with fall Mansfield authors Robert Earl Stewart, Jim Smith, and Tom Walmsley. + Expand
After a few back-and-forth rounds with first-time poet Robert Earl Stewart, who lives in Windsor, I sent Something Burned Along the Southern Border in for typesetting. It was a great editing process, and the result is a great book by a very committed writer, one of the most thoughtful I’ve ever worked with. And, man, he gives a good reading!
Another great process is the ongoing assembly of Jim Smith’s return to the poetry world with Back Off, Assassin: New & Selected Poems, his first book since 1998’s Leonel/Roque (Coteau). It’s been exciting to discover that the best of Jim’s new work surpasses anything he’s done, even after his decade-long holiday from poetry.
I’ve only seen early chunks of Tom Walmsley’s new novel, Dog Eat Rat, but these passages have left me wide-eyed and breathless. I expect to see a complete finished draft this month, and then Tom and I will work fast on what I expect to be a very light edit. Tom’s always worked quickly: his first novel, Doctor Tin, was the first winner of Pulp Press’s 3-Day Novel Contest back in 1978. And some years ago, when Tom was given only 18 months to live (the gift of a colleague’s liver has added many years to that), he wrote a 300-page novel, the first half of another novel, two poetry collections, a play, and a screenplay.
A poetry selection by Pier Giorgio di Cicco and a work of creative non-fiction from Amy Lavender Harris will round off the fall list. And already I’m getting giddy thinking of the great possibilities for 2010.
Steve Venright on Mondo , Lenny, and the Generator
Not much new to report this month, so I thought I’d do a little excavating. + Expand
Two years ago this July, I was interviewed by my son Kerry Zentner. He was interim arts editor for an online magazine called Mondo, and that’s where the text appeared: http://www.mondomagazine.net/art-f-aow-08.html
Since then, I’ve contributed a couple other pieces to Mondo. Below are links to a short “favourite books” article and an anecdotally expanded 25-year anniversary edition of an interview I did with Leonard Cohen (I was interviewing him, by the way): http://www.mondomagazine.net/2007/07/steve-venrights-top-five-books/ http://www.mondomagazine.net/2008/08/encountering-cohen-a-reminiscence-on-the-eve-of-a-new-world-tour/
(Cohen fans ought to take a look at the latter, if only to see the terrific shot of Lenny that Tom Robe took the day of the interview, back in May 1983.)
And here’s a recording of my reading at the April 2008 Ottawa International Writers’ Festival in — Well, I can’t remember where it was, actually, but I do remember that Stephen Brockwell was the host and everybody at the festival was so nice I’m sure they won’t mind my offering up this audio clip as an exclusive to Mansfield Revue visitors: http://www.venright.com/Audio/Venright_OIWF2008.m4a
Wait, there are two other things to report: a nighthawk just squeaped by my window and – at the suggestion of Jesse Huisken of This Ain’t the Rosedale Library – I'm reading an amazing and hilarious 1972 novella by David Ohle called Motorman (perhaps as funny as Fan Man, released soon after, by William Kotzwinkle).
I will leave you with these words from Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator, a great English band making its return to Canada this week after an absence of something like 31 years:
And though dark is the highway
and the peak’s distance breaks my heart,
for I never shall see it, still I play my part,
believing that what waits for us
is the cosmos compared to the dust of the past…
In the death of mere Humans Life shall start!
JUNE 2009
Fond
review by Aaron TuckerThe modern mind is no longer asked to remember. As Google swallows
information, repackages and archives it, the need for memory shrinks; it
becomes far more important to know where and how to find a fact than to retain that same fact ... + MorePigeon
review by Andrew FaulknerWe know who Karen Solie is. She is the author of Short Haul Engine and
Modern and Normal, which have brought her a fistful of awards and nom-
inations. + MoreJason Heroux sends a Hoboken postcard
Friday, May 29, 2009: I'm in Hoboken, New Jersey, with my father, staying in one of the vacant dormitories at the Stevens Institute of Technology. My father spent a memorable portion of his childhood growing up in this area, and a part of him one day wants his ashes buried near Helmer’s Restaurant, where they have an open-face steak sandwich so amazing anybody who eats one is haunted by the magical experience for life. + Expand
Yesterday we walked along Washington Avenue and took the New Jersey Path Train straight to downtown New York City, at 14th St W and 6th Ave, and spent some time at the Strand, where I bought a few books (Breyten Breytenbach's Windcatcher and Eugen Jebeleanu's Secret Weapon, among others). Tonight we're going to see the current Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, and then tomorrow it's back to Helmer's for another steak sandwich. It's a tradition every time we visit Hoboken to eat there as often as possible.
Another tradition I enjoy is getting lost in Yonkers, New York. Whenever I'm lost in Yonkers, I always try to visit the same antique store on Central Avenue for directions, where there's always the same old man behind the counter. Every time he sees me walk in, he picks up the phone to have something in his hand to bludgeon me with. I always keep a safe distance as I explain I'm lost. “You're in Yonkers,” he yells, and then I thank him and walk back outside.
Jim Smith searches for the Spanish Civil War
I've had the good luck to visit Spain three times in the last two years — Barcelona, Madrid, Granada, Frigiliana, Malaga and, most recently, León and Galicia in the northwest. + Expand
Each time I went looking for traces of the Spanish Civil War. I came back with mere traces.
In Barcelona, the city had a small temporary exhibit about the war on the second floor of a city building. I had Jo-Anne take pix of me in the photo crowds. I looked suitably grey and 2-D.
There were a few poster replicas in an old bookstore.
In Granada, we missed the unmarked spot where Lorca was taken out and beaten to death by Francoist thugs in 1936.
In whitewashed Frigiliana, on the Mediterranean side of a range of mountains in the south, a self-published book revealed that many men from the village fled to the mountains when Franco’s forces assumed control of the area. They fought until the last one was killed in 1952 or so, but were not guerrillas. They had been re-labelled bandits in 1939.
Driving north out of Madrid this April, on nearly empty highways, it was impossible to miss this huge cross thrust into the low mountains on the near horizon. Very creepy.
It was the monument that Franco had spent years building to mark his eventual burial place. A source says old men still gather there on certain days, in uniform.
We left the Barcelona exhibit by walking through a narrow tunnel with a gel floor and a lonely wind soundtrack. Your footprints glow for a second or two, then slowly fade. It’s a tribute to the many hundreds of thousands who fled Spain.
There is so little left in the few graves they’ve dug up.
Like memory.
Steve Venright reflects on somniloquies
Dion McGregor is one of the few human beings — can you think of another? — ever to achieve renown for a body of work created while fast asleep. For several years beginning in the early 1960s, McGregor’s New York roommate Michael Barr would rise early almost every morning to capture on tape what are still among the strangest narratives the world has known: the astounding spoken dreams of Dion McGregor. + Expand
In 1964, Decca released an LP compilation of these extraordinary “somniloquies” called The Dream World of Dion McGregor. The album’s fanciful cover image was by a young artist named Edward Gorey, who also illustrated a book of transcriptions by the same title from Bernard Geis Associates. It was 35 years before the CD sequel— Dion McGregor Dreams Again — was released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. That shocking, beguiling and hilarious compilation was brought to life by the efforts of a unique cultural conjuror named Phil Milstein.
I’d been fruitlessly on the trail of unreleased McGregor dream tapes for years when I finally happened to connect with Phil just prior to the release of the Dreams Again CD. Eventually satisfied that a guy whose record label was called Torpor Vigil might indeed be qualified to release material by a dead sleeptalker, Phil put me in touch with Michael Barr himself. Our shared love of “the dreams,” and my willingness to hear of his production hopes for a musical he’d written based on his friendship with the legendary sleeptalker, meant that Mike and I hit it off very well. Soon the entire reel-to-reel archive was in the care of Torpor Vigil Industries, so that I might digitally preserve its recordings and begin work on another Dream World sequel. The first new compilation was a 2004 CD called The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor: More Outrageous Recordings of the World’s Most Renowned Sleeptalker. After a considerable hiatus, I’ve recently begun to sequence three new compilations, which I hope to begin releasing in the fall. My track lists were being developed in consultation with Phil Milstein and, until so recently, Michael Barr.
Michael lived to share Dion’s dreams with the world. Sadly, he did not live to see his own greatest dream realized: a Hollywood or Broadway production of the musical inspired by those fascinating, flabbergasting somnolent monologues he’d diligently captured so long ago.
I hope you’ll find a few moments — or a couple, at least — to visit the MySpace page of Mr. Michael Preston Barr, where you’ll hear selections from his delightful repertoire of original songs, some of which have been performed by such luminaries as Blossom Dearie, Anita O’Day, Joel Grey and Mike’s lifelong favourite, Barbra Streisand (she recorded “Where Is the Wonder,” which features lyrics by Dion).
I’ll keep you posted on the progress of these forthcoming CDs. Meanwhile, thanks for stopping by, and thanks as well to Denis and Stuart for making Mansfield a wonderful enterprise to be part of. (Is that an acceptable way to end a sentence? Oh well, Stu will correct it if not — right, Stu?)
Michael Barr’s website
Phil Milstein’s biographical essay on Dion McGregor
More information on Steve's website (torporvigil.com)Check out the below audio (courtesy of Steve Venright) showcasing Dion McGregor's "somniloquies", as mentioned in Venright's above dispatch this month. Also here for your listening pleasure is a song written by Michael Barr and Dion McGregor, "Kicks", as sung by June Christy.
Selection Committee: Choosing the next Poet Laureate at City Hall
Edmonton ABThe candidates: highly disparate, one fitting the typical profile of pleasant,
greying, appropriately bedecked, describing poetry as a “kind of health care,”the other young & black, a rapper on tour, talking of words as “things of
connection, yeah, it's all good,” a bowl of M & M's on the long table, sunentering through the glass walls, depositing stanzas of light on the floor.
The mayor stops by to wish the process well, genial, tending to scruffafter two terms in office - “we gotta get em at the start, those new artists,
make em stay in town, whattya think, only 100 grand or so to kick this off,”grabbing a handful of brightly shelled nuts, heading home to be with his “main girl.” Our questions surround community, commitment, ambassadorship
to the world and, of course, potholes, whether they can be filled
by dialing 311, the fresh councillor peeling off his tie, a “servantof the people” longing to gouge the nagging masses with those self-same dents; the assistant rises to serve apple juice, gingerale, we all scrawl notes on suitability,
artistic achievement, as if the role were clearly defined, a lucent, logical
occupation and not this immesurable position, funded by the slippery whimsof private donors, subject to oil's fall or rise, a strange sort of nobility, that
seen in the statue of Robbie Burns, capturedin copper by the Hotel Mac downtown, slender liege,
on one ephemeral knee, gazing out towards the river.(Catherine Owen is the co-author of Dog, Mansfield Press, Fall 2008)
MAY 2009
Crabwise, Crabwise Burning Bright
review by Jeff LatosikWallace Stevens famously quipped, “A poem need not have a meaning
and like most things in nature often does not have.” + MoreJason Heroux praises parking lots
A little while ago a friend asked why I had so much parking-lot imagery in my poetry. I wasn’t sure how to answer. I gave it some thought and realized there’s something about parking lots I’ve always found beautiful and mysterious, especially late at night when they’re empty. + Expand
They have a peaceful, Zen-like quality about them, an oasis of nothingness in the crowded, cluttered desert of modern culture. Under a streetlamp, with all the debris and shattered glass sparkling in the light, an empty parking lot resembles a beach at low tide. It’s not as if I go out of my way to walk around a parking lot at night, but whenever I catch a glimpse of one a part of my soul feels a little more nourished.
Everyone’s probably familiar with Auden’s famous lines: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / in the valley of its making…” (“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”). Most people see those lines, out of context, as an indication of poetry’s ineffectiveness and overall lack of importance. But I always think of that phrase as something positive: that the ability to make nothing happen might be one of poetry’s greatest strengths. It gives weight to absence and lends nothingness a voice. Like an empty parking lot late at night, poetry helps “nothingness” feel at home in the world. That’s probably why there are quite a few parking lots in my poems. Sometimes an empty parking lot can make nothing happen too.
Robert Earl Stewart's "Near Muted Swans"
Near Muted Swans
A likeness like an electrocardiogram
fire bleeding a blood orange running
into what can only be called corpse paint grey,then rust wet waterline.
I’m playing this game with the top of the food chain
in the boats docked along the canal,
with a long way to go through a Confederate
town at night while muted swans fill a bend in the river.
(from Something Burned Along the Southern Border, forthcoming from Mansfield Press, Fall 2009) + ExpandI work as the editor of a weekly newspaper in LaSalle, Ontario. On several occasions from summer 2007 to winter 2008, I stood with my camera on a dock outside of an ice-cream parlour overlooking the Detroit River, hoping to photograph a bald eagle I was told fished in the shallows there. Despite the ice-cream proprietor’s assurances that the eagle came almost every day, months passed without a sighting. (That scenario turns up in the poem “The Ice Cream Hour,” which will also be included in my first collection of poetry, Something Burned Along the Southern Border, out with Mansfield Press in Fall 2009.) But, on one particular January day, while waiting for the bald eagle, I was watching a whiteness of muted swans float in the river bend and snapped a shot of the corrugated steel breakwall and promptly wrote the first draft of “Near Muted Swans” in my reporter’s notebook. It also contains a reference to the folksong and children’s book The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night.
More photos at my photoblog, glasspoeme.
Aside from working in newspapers, I instruct creative writing workshops at Mackenzie Hall as part of the City of Windsor’s Parks & Recreation programming. One thing I’m always impressing on beginning writers is the enormously important role that reading plays in the whole process. It’s surprising how many aspiring writers, particularly of poetry, don’t immediately see the connection between input and output. One of the things I hear the most from workshoppers (and these aren’t children either; I’m usually the youngest person in the room) is that they don’t know where to find good contemporary poetry, and if they know where to find it, they don’t know who they should read. I would hate to be in that situation. I also love making lists. So here’s a list of cool, eye-opening collections of poetry I’ve read in the past six months or so, in no particular order:
All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman (APR, 2008)
The New Layman’s Almanac by Jacob McArthur Mooney (M&S, 2008)
Seven Notebooks by Campbell McGrath (Ecco, 2007)
Emergency Hallelujah by Jason Heroux (Mansfield, 2008)
The Death Notebooks by Anne Sexton (Houghton Mifflin, 1974)
Word Comix by Charlie Smith (W.W. Norton, 2009)
The Border Kingdom by D. Nurkse (Knopf, 2008)
Pigeon by Karen Solie (Anansi, 2009)
Why Are You So Sad? by David W. McFadden (Insomniac Press, 2007)
Hard Rain by Tony Hoagland (Hollyridge, 2005)
The Ghost Soldiers by James Tate (Ecco, 2008)
American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, Cole Swensen and David St. John, eds. (W.W. Norton, 2009)Alice Burdick at Seen Reading's 30 in 30
Joe Rosenblatt on poetry and socialism
The NaPoMo Questionnaire: Stuart Ross
APRIL 2009
“Pure with Wild Intention”: On Jason Camlot’s The Debaucher
by Alessandro Porco
The title poem of Jason Camlot’s third collection of poetry, The Debaucher, is an essay into the meaning and value of debauchery as an aesthetic and ethos ... + More
Nailing Down the Hard Parts: The Challenge of First Books
by Zachariah Wells
Our culture seems particularly keen on celebrating the emergence of new poets. + More"Hello!" from Alice Burdick
Well, hello there! A little introduction: I’m Alice Burdick. I was born and raised in Toronto, and have lived also in Espanola, Ontario (for a year!), and in Vancouver and Robert’s Creek. B.C., before moving out to Halifax in 2002. Now I live in beautiful Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. It’s a tiny town with an excess of churches and 900 residents (in the summer). + Expand
Today I went to the Biscuit Eater to buy some bread from La Vendéenne, a local organic French bakery. Fridays are market days in Mahone Bay. The Biscuit Eater is a great local café and bookstore — it hosts many readings and events. The first person I saw read there was Mark Strand. He stood in the doorway of the patio, with curtains billowing out around him, while the audience sat outside. It was a great reading.
I work at a seasonal gallery here, and in the winter months I stay in a lot. Hazel is now almost 21 months, so she keeps me busy by having me read books to her repeatedly. Right now Richard Scarry is a favourite. I’m trying to teach her the word sloth.
In early February I went to Springhill Penitentiary with my friend and fellow poet Alison Smith. Her mother is involved with restorative justice, and Alison has led some writing workshops there over the past year or so. We introduced the participants (two small groups) to the Exquisite Corpse (but I didn’t call it that). It was a pretty wonderful experience — these guys are very curious about different forms of poetry and, interestingly, were more receptive than many audiences I’ve seen. In early April I’ll be heading back out there with Alison and John Wall Barger to do some readings for and alongside the inmates. Poetry Month on the inside!
Christopher Doda on translation
Like all writers, my partner and I have a number of perpetual grouses about the writing world. One of ours is the scarcity of translation done in Canada, especially of poetry, and especially by poets. A casual perusal of the biographies of major poets worldwide will show that most have engaged in translation work. In Canada, not so much. By which I mean, hardly at all. Our poets, major or minor, have been reluctant to perform this valuable, though largely thankless, service. + Expand
Well, my partner, Priscila Uppal, is significantly more organized than I am so she decided to actually do something about it. The result is 20 Canadian Poets Take on the World from Exile Editions, an anthology Uppal edited and introduced of 20 Canuck versifiers (including her and myself, Ken Babstock, Christian Bök, Dionne Brand, Barry Callaghan, Rishma Dunlop, Steven Heighton, Sonnet L’Abbe, Erin Moure, Al Moritz, Paul Vermeersch, and Darren Wershler) translating 20 non-English poets from different millennia and from 15 languages. So far as I know (and I’m happy to be proven wrong), an anthology of this type has never been done in Canada. Hopefully it will showcase translation for what it is: an essential component of creative life, equally important as the production of new work from our poets.
The book will be launched with readings from several contributors in Toronto at the Dora Keogh Pub (141 Danforth Ave) on April 22, 2009, at 7 pm and in Montreal at the Green Room/Salon Vert (5386 St Laurent Blvd) on April 29, 2009, at 7 pm.
Stuart Ross talks fall books
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been giddily working on manuscripts with two brilliant poets who are new to Mansfield. + Expand
Robert Earl Stewart is a young poet from Windsor, Ontario, who has been popping up more and more frequently in literary journals recently. Mansfield is proud to be publishing his fall 2009 debut, Something Burned Along the Southern Border. I love that title. For me, it brings to mind an early Coen Brothers film, or maybe something out of Cormac McCarthy. Robert and I have been bouncing the manuscript back and forth, and now we’re coming down the home stretch. It’s really exciting to be working with an enthusiastic, hardworking writer on a first book.
The other fall 2009 project I’m concentrating on now is more of a challenge, perhaps, because it’s a New & Selected. Which entails making agonizing decisions about what to include from half a dozen earlier books. The author is Jim Smith, a poet who was really active in the Toronto scene from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when he left the lit world to study law. Jim was known for his insane readings (he once had someone tie him to a chair, after which he interrogated himself using what the Bush admin might have called “enhanced interrogation techniques” and his lively, surreal, politically charged poems. I’m so glad Jim is coming back to the literary fold; his new book is tentatively titled Back Off, Assassin: New & Selected Poems.
I’m doing some readings this month, and three of them happen to be alongside Mansfield writers. On April 1, at Clinton’s in Toronto, I’m launching my new short-story collection from Freehand Books, and my guests readers are Heather Hogan and Steve Venright, whose Mansfield title Floors of Enduring Beauty received a rave review recently from Alex Porco. On April 18, I’m reading at the Chameleon Nation reading series in Kingston with Jason Heroux, whose two full-length collections are both from Mansfield: Memoirs of an Alias and Emergency Hallelujah. (I met Jason in 2004, before I was involved in Mansfield, when he asked me to blurb his debut collection.) On April 23, I’m reading at Toronto’s LiveWords series with my literary hero David W. McFadden, whose wonderful, gonzo collection of sonnets, Be Calm, Honey, I had the honour of editing for Mansfield last year. Dave was a hero of mine when I was a teenager, and I think this is the first time we’ll have read together.
Okay … back to work.
The Boat
This is not just some passing fishing boat
powered by a weighty engine bubbling
testicular fumes … smoky testosterone.
There’ll be three of us onboard: my soul and I
accompanied by a flask of dark fortifying rum.
I’ll carry no lethal fishing rod to jig
for salmon, rockfish, lingcod, or flounder
whose harlequin mouths whisper a prayer
while they vacuum grub in the sediment.
I’m not an angler, just a thoughtful pilgrim.(Joe Rosenblatt is the co-author of Dog, Mansfield Press, Fall 2008)